Some of GDPR's language around consent for data processing (which, I will note, you only need if you don't have a legitimate and expected purpose for storing and processing it!) has implications for friction: many 'cookie popups' are not compliant because they make not giving consent harder than giving consent.
But deletion requests are not so strong: if you make people really jump through hoops then you might get in some trouble, but the expencted standard is basically at 'sending an email and getting a result within 30 days'.
Depending on the data "sending an email and getting a result within 30 days" may not be basis for approving deletion request. You have no way to identify whether the data is associated with the person (if the data is not associated with the email).
So additional validation would surely be subject to friction.
The missing status page [1] treats it as downtime any time any component of the system is down, and calculates the overall uptime based on the time that doesn't overlap with any individual category outages, and the overall downtime as any time overlapping with at least one individual category outage to avoid double-counting They show 24h of minor outage on that date.
I'm guessing that this site is taking the downtime in a given day across all services and adding it up, which would mean the worst possible day has 10 days of downtime (a day of downtime for each major category).
I see a bullet point for "1.0 days of 1.3 days", and when I mouse over the previous day (Wedensday 2025-11-19), I see "7.8 hours of 1.3 days".
I haven't actually checked any sources to confirm there really was downtime on those days, but if we assume those numbers are true 7.8 hours + 1 day is about 1.3 days.
> At Chrome's scale, the climate bill for one model push, paid in atmospheric CO2 by the entire planet, is between six thousand and sixty thousand tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions, depending on how many devices receive the push.
Environmental analysis for operations? Not a fan of thinking in such terms.
> For users on capped mobile data plans, particularly in regions where smartphone-as-only-internet is dominant (much of Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, most of Latin America), 4 GB of unrequested download is on the order of a month's data allowance, vapourised by Chrome on the user's behalf. Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.
THIS is a valid concern. Otherwise I'm not buying into "ask for consent because of dependency X". Users don't like questions/consents.
However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.
Some parts of the anti-AI movement are becoming so unhinged that now any use of compute is considered an environmental threat. This degrowth mentality needs to die.
No need for unlimited growth, just normal sustainable progress like the one that allows you and me to communicate here after centuries of technological progress.
The "normal sustainable progress" has already pushed us to the brink of extinction. AI is rapidly accelerating our resource use, with nothing good to show for it.
How exactly are we "on the brink of extinction"? ("We" as in humans; many other species are obviously not as lucky.)
We are probably on the brink of very bad consequences for a signification fraction of all humans (up to and including all of them, to some extent), which is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.
But what do you gain by incorrectly labeling that as "extinction"? Because you do definitely lose credibility for it, similarly to everybody using hyperbolic language such as "boiling the oceans" etc.
This is literally why the EU mandates appliance energy efficiency.
It's never a binary thing. "Is using energy good or bad?" is a stupid question which can only provide stupid answers. It has to be placed in the context of whether it's proportionate to benefit.
Things which burn a lot of energy for little benefit - and in the case of AI, often negative benefit - end up more towards the "bad".
You're not seriously trying to explain that a kWh is equal to a kWh. Why not cut the crap? Are you trying to say washing clothes is of equal importance to convenience features in a browser, given that we can use each clean kWh only once? I can't tell what you truly mean like this
What do you mean you "disagree"? I pay for the electricity I use and I use it however I want.
Instead of trying to control other people, why can't you start with yourself? Throw away your phone/computer. Go live in a small hut. Practice what you preach.
>You are incurring debt and forcing it upon others.
You seem to have no problem whatsoever with using electricity yourself. So when do you get to tell me (or anyone else) how to live? And when does it stop? Btw, this is all bizarrely dramatic since we were talking about small local models anyway.
>future generations
Yeah, and some will also say (using the same arguments) that having children is harmful to the planet and we need "measures" to limit that too.
I’m not telling you to do one thing or another. I’m taking issue with your argument that because you pay an electric bill, it follows that you can do whatever you want.
That does not follow logically for me. As humans we disagree about many things, but we generally agree that things that we do often affect others, so one way or another, we need to come together and decide which things are agreed to be acceptable and which things are not.
And I'm not inclined to entertain this nonsense, not even as a hypothetical. I'm not giving up on my most basic and fundamental rights, doubly so when these draconian restrictions won't apply to the people who want to impose them.
The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]
Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.
What you're proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It's either degrowth or we all die, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.
Why do you attribute to capitalism an issue that is much more fundamental than it? People want more stuff and better lives, it's as simple as that. Even hunger/gatherer societies brought themselves to extinction multiple times in the past, and I doubt the USSR would have fared better against climate change.
Technological progress is also societal progress. If we embraced degrowth in the 1800's (there was a ton of pollution back then, and a Malthusian belief in disaster!) we might not see slavery being abolished or women being able to vote.
> People want more stuff and better lives, it's as simple as that.
Not everyone wants this at the cost of others. It's not as simple as that / not a necessary consequence of our desire to find clever solutions to solve everyday inconveniences
Because capitalism ties together better lives an ideological belief in unbounded growth.
Will people's lives really be better once they're drowning or choking on wildfire smoke? But hey, at least they had cheap junk!
It's possible to have better lives as well as societal progress without endless growth. Technological progress, too, doesn't have to mean burning our oceans. We just gotta actually think about the costs and consequences of our actions.
Not every technological development is inherently good. Sometimes the cost is not worth the result. I posit the cost of AI so far has been astronomical, higher than anything else in living memory. The results on the other hand have been rather middling.
This is my issue. A cost/benefit analysis, not a strict no to progress.
Have you ever made a decision to NOT download something, turn on your computer, experiment, etc based on your perceived impact on the planet?
I mean this should (and is) be tackled at the source: 0/low emission energy generation and not consumer having to think about these decisions. Sustainable data centers using renewables etc. But not that the companies should associate/evaluate/consider bytes downloaded with environmental impact.
>not consumer having to think about these decisions
Consumers vote and advocate for what they want and don't want. There are many who say it's not an individual problem and should be dealt with broadly through regulation, then also oppose any attempts at regulation.
> this should (and is) be tackled at the source: 0/low emission energy generation and not consumer having to think about these decisions.
Until we're at that point though, the 'winners' in this market society (that wield unimaginable amounts of money = resources) such as Google could certainly think about consequences of their choices. And they usually do to some extent, I'm not saying they don't, just that electric supply and demand has two sides to it
I'm going to assume you work in tech and know the issues that come with scale.
Me, individually not doing something is gonna absolutely be drowned out by the scale of many other people not thinking of it or being incentivized against it.
This is a systemic issue. A systemic issue needs a systemic solution, not a blame shift to the individual.
We didn't get rid of lead in gas or asbestos in walls by telling people it was bad for them. We did so by banning it.
> However OS (at least windows) has an way to set network connection as a metered so software can make informed decisions. Also Android has "Data Saver" function which should also be honored by software.
Unfortunately, that automation is unreliable. It doesn't work across operating systems - Windows laptops won't enable data-saver mode when connected to iPhones and macOS laptops won't when connected to Android phones, and neither will enable it when connected to, say, public transport wifi.
And even if the OS has the information, websites can't reliably use it either. Firefox and Safari both don't implement the NetworkInformation API [1].
I know it takes extra steps to make Android perform OS or app updates over LTE. I doubt it's downloading a 4GB model over LTE unless the user has chosen to perform updates over LTE.
> so anyone interested can reproduce the results themselves.
Weird reasoning.
You already caught our attention with your article. But not everyone has the time or means to go and re-do the tests.
However such information is really important to surface when making infra decisions. And if one of the brain cells pops up and says something about 20-80% perf improvement VS there were some perf improvements - which would be more convincing to research the topic when the time comes for the reader to benefit from your research?
1279 units vs total 20'000'000 units or 0,006% doesn't make a difference
What is interesting is that tesla had 1'636'129 deliveries in 2025 which accounts for 8,1% of that number. That means other vendors are healthy and it is a good thing for EV market.
You are using HN which may or may not be hosted in datacenter.
To reach HN you are probably hopping via some communication hubs that may be located in datacenter.
You are going to store to buy some stuff which probably hosts their infra in a datacenter or use datacenter services.
You do use mobile phone? Well they also need to host services somewhere and make connectivity.
The school where your kids go either uses school management software and/or websites which provide educational material or doing exams.
Then you have online video conferencing...
I mean this list could get pretty long - I think listing them here on HN is kind of useless. It is just the datacenter infra is at the very bottom, providing foundational but invisible service to end users. Just like we don't see how things are manufactured or how raw materials are sourced for making real stuff, same goes with datacenter.
Well datacenters ARE rated by their power usage. And then there is a PUE ratio which indicates how much power is to be used by feeding the equipment vs overall usage for supporting equipment (cooling).
Just this week we launched a datacenter hat runs 100% on renewable energy even in case when diesel engines have to turn on and seeking LEED certification: https://delska.com/about/news-resources/delska-newsroom/dels... - the available energy to the DC is always trumpeted in topic. Yeah, we are kind of proud of technical achievements and efficiency achieved.
But we have the luxury as being slightly nordic, not needing to consume water for cooling. And what is not widespread but taking effect is that datacenters are able to give the heat for useful purposes like heating homes. It needs datacenter to be in city and cooperation for gov agencies, but this is the path that is being taken across countries: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/06/sustainable-data-cen...
Modern datacenters use local power generation that means lots of bad pollution worse than most factories. There is really bad sound pollution from many of them. They are enormous and create barriers where people should be able to move around.
> So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I’d seen the problems others had. I’d seen what I wanted to avoid doing.
Just so that people know that creating software is not only coding.
My comment is unrelated on the point you are making about expenses.
GDPR has nothing to do with friction I beleve.
Our lawyer told me that GDPR also applies to paper records, so there is some real-world friction right there.
The important part that there is a right - in whatever good/broken process it is enveloped is irrelevant.
Moreover does HN host PII data? Not if you don't give it to them.
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